This invention relates generally to enhanced searching techniques for electronic documents, and more specifically to the authenticating of electronic documents, referenced by electronic document addresses associated with geographic locations used in searching.
Searching for a particular electronic document on a network based upon geographic location currently presents many problems. For example, searching to find an HTML document on the World Wide Web associated with a geographic location returns many false positives (electronic documents not really associated with the geographic location specified) while also resulting in many misses (electronic documents not found that really are associated with the geographic location). The enormous number of electronic documents on the World Wide Web (it is estimated that 2.2 million Web sites offer 300 million Web documents) multiplies the problem of false positives in a geographic based search.
Keyword-based geographic searching functionality, such as GeoSearch by Vicinity Corporation (used on www.northernlight.com) provides some geographic restricted search capability. In these systems a keyword search based upon the geographic location specified is executed, then the user's location is determined and found electronic documents that are determined to be within a predefined range of the user are reported. The user's location is usually determined by querying the user for their city, state, country or zip code information. The geographic location of the electronic documents is determined by a specialized keyword parsing algorithm designed to identify addresses within electronic documents. Simply finding keywords that indicate an electronic document contains an address does not guarantee that the address corresponds to a geographic location associated with the electronic document. For example, when searching for a list of electronic documents related to “stores selling books in Boston, Mass.” many false positives are possible, including electronic documents listing “books I read while in Boston, Mass.”. Additionally, stores that do not format their addresses in such a way as to be recognized by the geographic keyword searching algorithm, or exclude their address completely, will not be reported. On the World Wide Web these electronic documents are referenced by electronic document addresses in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”).
Another approach to searching for electronic documents associated with geographic locations is the use of “online yellow pages” type functionality. In these systems a directory of business names is created that is searchable and sortable using geographic location. Providers of online yellow pages directories solicit data from prospective businesses and provide a searchable online listing for the businesses. Typically, the listing includes a name, address and phone number and is searchable by business name or business category. Yellow page directories typically exclude non-business entities (e.g., schools, government offices). Some services provide a URL if the business has a Web site. An exemplary online yellow pages site is www.yellowpages.com.
Yet another approach is the creation of “localized” portals (e.g., www.ca.yahoo.com for Yahoo! Canada) and “city pages” (e.g., www.citysearch.com) which restrict their content to that associated with a specific, predetermined, geographic area. These portals allow users to restrict searches to a preselected geographic region (e.g., Canada), but the regions tend to be countries or large, well populated, cities. These localized portals and city pages are typically built by human operators indexing Web pages associated with the specific, predefined geographic location.